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Gardenback
A '''gardenback' strides across the rainplains of the Great Basin, accompanied by an entourage of grazers which seek safety in its shadow from their flying enemies, the emperor skystriders, which stalk the basin and nest on the outlying cliffs. Behind, semi-aquatic blunderbeasts - large flightless birds - swim in the shallow rivers and feed on the abundant vegetation. Their ancestors reached the basin long ago, and would have closely resembled beaked squirrels.'' To reach the basins by land, passing through the miles of sheer cliffs and drops from the forests beyond, is difficult, almost impossible to manage in a lifetime, and so the animals which live there are descended almost exclusively from cliff-climbing specialists and are, in turn, found nowhere outside these isolated microcosm. Different animals have evolved in each of the major isolated basins largely independent of one another, with the wildlife of the Great Basin, also the oldest rainplain habitat present in the ravine jungle at approximately 20 million years of age, being some of the most unique. Here heavyset quadrupedal birds, evolved from nimble arboreal ancestors, waddle leisurely through the shallow rivers and idly graze on the shores. Nimble bronkjirds thrive, as agile as ever, leaping over the tall grasses and saturated soil in epic bounds in the shadows of giants: enormous crab-like polyarths called gardenbacks, descended from arboreal climbing creatures which live in the forest, have adapted remarkably to the abundant grass and become towering, striding creatures thirty feet high and weighing thirty tons. With massive claws and insatiable appetites they constantly pull up vegetation and bring it to a gnashing sideways-oriented beak, making short work of shrubs and young trees and favoring the growth of faster-growing herbs, thus keeping the rainplain grassy and clear of forest. The carapaces of the adults are colored green with mosses and tufts of grass which sustain themselves as epiphytes upon its epidermis, being shed in sections ever few years as their owner molts the outer and overgrown layers of its skin to slough off this extra weight. In the meantime, a thriving micro-ecosystem exists upon the gardens which establish upon them - miniscule insect-like polyarths and small invertebrates creep along the moss, attracting birds and other small animals which hunt through the leaves and fronds to find them. Certain larger birds may even nest upon the carapace of the gardenbacks, where their young will be protected from predators on the ground below. Gardenbacks, one of the planet's largest land animals, are found exclusively in the great basin, where they number only in the low hundreds at any one time. Reproduction is slow and longevity unknown, presumably spanning several centuries, preventing the overexploitation of their isolated habitat. Hemmed in by the ravine jungle and now too specialized to leave it the way their ancestors came, they are penned into what amounts to a natural enclosure, potentially leaving the whole population vulnerable to natural disaster or outbreak of disease. Fortunately for the gardenback, the basin oasis is set to expand dramatically...eventually. In coming eons, this flat and fertile plain is apt to be the eventual state of the entire ravine jungle. In another hundred million years, the ravines will be gone and the caves below crumbled, dissolved into the water and deposited as a new layer of sediment on the bottom of a series of lakes just like that which fills the heart of the Great Basin today. As the sediment accumulates, the lake will become a plain and eventually, the plain may become a forest again - on a much more modest scale. Life, assuredly, will adapt, as life does, and will go on no matter the hurdles the environment throws upon it,' for the ravine jungle is, and always has been, built upon change.' Rain and weather constantly modify its form, crumbling spires and carving new channels in the ancient rock. Creatures enter the forest and over generations change to better survive its rigors and obtain its resources. The inevitable loss of the ravine forest will be such a gradual process that its individual inhabitants are unlikely to notice, just as the cliff-climbing bronkjirds and boobers and the fearsome manguar pay no mind to the fact that the high cliffs and peaks that provide their livelihood, once mountaintops, now sit below the level of the sea. Life adapted to survive in the ravines from the outside forests and will, when the time comes, adapt again to live outside them. by Sheatherius Category:Serina Category:Fandom